Star Trek: CineMcCollough

We are back on mission at Star Trek CineMcCollough, going way back to the earliest days of the Pocket Books novels for number four, "The Covenant of the Crown." Written by Howard Weinstein - this is our second book review for Weinstein, who also wrote Deep Domain, after becoming famous for having a story produced for The Animated Series in 1974 when he was just 19 years old (!!!), Weinstein this t...

Your friends at CineMcCollough are kicking off our third season of Trek Novel Madness today with the next randomly-selected novel from the pool of the first 50 Pocket Books novels -- what we call "Is That a Trek in Your Pocket?" The only Star Trek novel ever published - heck, the only novel of any kind ever published - by Carolyn Clowes. "The Pandora Principle" takes place between The Motion Pictu...

Now, at last, we reach the Season 2 Finale, which finishes off the first half of our FIFTY BOOK mission through the Pocket Books Universe - what we call Is That a Trek in Your Pocket? -- before we begin the cruise through the second half we will take up the lone book by author Sonni Cooper (who was a name of note within the early Star Trek fandom, being part of the community that kept that fandom...

One last brief bit of shore leave to take care of before we get to our final mission of Season 2... and that mission takes us back to the Peter Pan Audio and Book collection of stories from the 1970s for the fifth episode of that series, the 1975 short story "To Starve a Fleaver." Once again written by legendary author Alan Dean Foster, you can probably tell from the title of this one that it is a...

The big stop on our final shore leave of Season 2 of our Star Trek novels multi-year mission takes us to Camp Khitomer and the last best chance for galactic peace - aka the 1991 theatrical release "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country." The final film featuring all of the main cast from the original Star Trek, the cast literally 'signs off' right before the opening credits... but first this is a...

One last shore leave before our Season 2 finale, this one is a three-parter, starting with the fourth episode of the Peter Pan Records Star Trek book-and-audio series. Released in 1975 and coming in at a breezy 16 minutes, "The Time Stealer" was written by Cary Bates and Neal Adams. This short adventure has the crew experiencing time distortions (nothing new there) only to find that the source mig...

We have revisited many novels in the Pocket Universe of Star Trek about which Rob and Butch remember very little from their first time reading them forty-or-so years ago. But today's novel is one that both Butch and Rob remember pretty well, and found that they still enjoyed it quite a lot. Ah, the bittersweet tinge of nostalgia. Written by Brad Ferguson (his first of two TOS novels for Pocket Boo...

Despite the fact that there are two more movies that released during the run of first 50 Pocket Books Star Trek novels, today's random selection, "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock," is the last we will be visiting in our 50-planet mission, as the ST-IV and ST-V novelizations, while published, are not part of the numbered list of novels. Written once again by Vonda N. McIntyre, and published Jun...

We finish off Diane Duane's contribution to the first 50 Pocket Books Star Trek novels today with "The Wounded Sky," released in December of 1983. Like a Romulan Sandwich, the fourth novel and the first we reviewed (Doctor's Orders) are not Romulan-centric, while the other two are quintessential Romulan adventures. You will see echoes of some familiar televised Star Trek adventures, particularly i...

Well we were bound to roll #1 at some point and today our mission takes us to the first cinematic Star Trek adventure, "Star Trek the Motion Picture." Released in December 1979, essentially at the same time as the film itself, the book is a fascinating look into the earlier version of what the movie was supposed to be - PLUS it has the added bonus of being a look inside of the mind of the Great Bi...

If you have ever wondered whether Star Trek has done a vampire story, hold on to your horse, my friends, because author J.M. Dillard is about to go gothic on our good ship and crew. This is Dillard's second novel we've reviewed out of three that she wrote for the first 50 Pocket novels, released December 1987, and finds the crew investigating a failed expedition that was studying life prolongation...

Two of the most prolific Star Trek writers contribute today's Pocket Books mission to our Pocket Treks... Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, a married couple of science fiction authors, had already contributed two hardcover novels to the Star Trek universe before today's numbered adventure, "Memory Prime," which was released in October 1988. One of the Stevens' strong points as storytellers is to...

For the second half of our season 2 third quarter shore leave, we are going to THAT one - yes, that is right, we are going to bite the bullet and set course for the center of the galaxy to encounter God, or whatever else we might find there. Today, we set course for "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier." Released in 1989, the fifth cinematic movie in the franchise had quite a lot of momentum behind it...

Well, it is time for shore leave again, so we are taking our quick stop at the third Peter Pan Records audio-and-book adventure from the mid-1970s, "The Crier in Emptiness." Once again penned by Alan Dean Foster, this short Trek has the ship encounter an area of space where music pervades the entire ship at all times... what could it be? Enlisting the help of Lt. Connors, and his Edoian Elisiar (s...

While we here at CineMcCollough are proud of our strategy of random selection and review of the first fifty Pocket Books novels, it DOES have its drawbacks... take today's adventure, for example, where the dice of destiny selected "Time For Yesterday" by A.C. Crispin... which, while it is a sequel to the TOS third season (underrated) episode All Our Yesterdays, it is not a DIRECT sequel, because C...

Today's mission takes us to a novel published May 1985 and featuring something that, when I first saw it, I admit I scoffed at the idea. "Ishmael" by Barbara Hambly (who will go on to write two more Trek novels) tells the story of Spock being lost in time as a Klingon ship he has secretly infiltrated suddenly disappears - seemingly from existence - only to have Spock arrive in the Pacific Northwes...

On today's mission we really DO go where no one has gone before, as we join the crew in progress when they encounter a gravitational anomaly that, seemingly without warning, transports the Enterprise to another galaxy. In "Chain of Attack," prolific Trek author Gene DeWeese (in their first Trek novel) leads the ship to the center of a conflict that is seemingly centuries old, leaving them to try t...

Our next mission finds Rob and Butch running things back to the good ol' days of the Journey to Bantam, as Bantam Books alums Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreth (of the Phoenix novel fame) try their hand at a Trek story NOT involving the baddest man in the galaxy, Omne. Instead, this March 1982 novel goes metaphysical with us, as our crew meets a group of super-powerful, otherworldly entities that...

Writer John Ford brings us the first of his two Pocket Books Star Trek novels today, "The Final Reflection." First published in May 1984, this is really a book-within-a-book, as it opens and closes with Captain Kirk reading a brand-new novel that is taking his crew by storm... a novel about a mythological Klingon hero, allegedly written by a famous Human ambassador as his firsthand account. If you...

Back on our "Is That a Trek in Your Pocket" mission for lucky number thirteen... the one where Spock has a great fall and suffers a traumatic brain injury. "Mindshadow" was published on January 1986 and was written by J.M. Dillard, aka Jeanne Kalogridis. It is our first time picking one of her books, but there are three in the first 50 Pocket books... and she wrote the novelizations for the next s...

For our cinematic stop on this shore leave, we go back to when Rob and Butch were high school juniors and living a state apart (after Rob moved to Wenatchee, Washington) - arguably the most successful TOS theatrical release, the 1986 trilogy-ending "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home." Once again directed by Leonard Nimoy, this time he has to direct HIMSELF on screen for quite a bit of the action. And...

For our second shore leave during our Season Two "Is That a Trek in Your Pocket" mission, we make another quick stop at the Peter Pan Records-and-Books series for the second short audio adventure "In Vino Veritas." Once again penned by Alan Dean Foster, this short adventure has Captain Kirk in negotiations for planetary mining rights with a Klingon AND a Romulan envoy... but what they did NOT expe...

Hey, guess who's back - yep... it is the Romulans, once again. Continuing their heavy presence in our mix of "Is That a Trek in Your Pocket?" so far, this novel is brought to us by Della Van Hise, in her only Star Trek novel (though she had published under other titles) and yet blends fairly seamlessly into the other Romulan adventures we have seen thus far. Van Hise creates a time-travel story in...

We at CineMcCollough are off on another Pocket Trek adventure, this one from February of 1988 - "The IDIC Epidemic" by Jean Lorrah. We are off to a planet where countless races work side-by-side, including Humans and Klingons. Except something is terribly wrong - a new disease is taking down the population, AND it seems to be driven by EXACTLY the same concept of 'infinite diversity in infinite co...

Today's mission is a novel by one of Star Trek's most prolific novelists - Michael Jan Friedman, who has penned EIGHT TOS novels, and over 20 novels for other series (including an inexplicable TNG-X-Men crossover), all starting with this one, published April 1989. The one thing we have REALLY been missing (while not really missing it) since the end of our Journey to Bantam has been the propensity...